Global Food Shortages?

'Each month is gay, each season nice, when eating chicken soup with rice.' -Maurice Sendak

The April edition of Scientific America asks the question, Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? The author states:

For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. ... Yet I have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization. I can no longer ignore that risk. ... As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets.

In the past century, spikes in grain prices were event driven and temporary. For example, in 1972 the Soviets quietly cornered the world wheat market before the rest of the world learned about their poor harvest. Wheat prices doubled that year but returned to normal with the next harvest. Other event-driven price increases included drought in the Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, and crop-shrinking heat in the U.S. Corn Belt.

But Scientific American believes the price increase in grains from 2007 and 2008 are different. These are caused by trends that are not likely to change:

• Ongoing addition of more than 70 million new people a year to feed. Yield gains in the 60s and 70s were amazing (+2% annually) but the "Green Revolution" has run its course. Global crop yields are now increasing at 1% a year while population grows at 1.2%.
• More money in China & India is allowing people to move up the food chain from a grain diet to a meat diet. It takes more grain to raise cows or pigs or chickens then to feed people directly.
• Massive diversion of grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries. The price for lower US fuel costs is more expensive global grain costs.
• Irrigation, which consumes 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, in many countries is now pumping water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them. Half of India’s traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up.
• Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a third of the world’s cropland. The UN predicts that the African nation of "Lesotho faces a catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to reverse soil erosion, degradation and the decline in soil fertility.”

Bottom Line
We don't see much said in the news but there is a growing global panic over food shortages.
- In 2007 leading wheat-exporting countries such as Russia and Argentina limited or banned their exports. Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest rice exporter, stopped exporting for several months.
- In response, nations like the Philippines are signing multi-year contracts for rice from Vietnam to ensure delivery.
-In Thailand villagers must guard their rice fields at night with loaded shotguns from “rice rustlers”.
-In Pakistan an armed soldier escorts each grain truck.
-In the first half of 2008, 83 trucks carrying grain in Sudan were hijacked before reaching the Darfur relief camps.